Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain will perform Sunday at Stephens Auditorium in Ames, just three days after the uke virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro played here in Des Moines. So we might as well get this joke out of the way: It’s just one plucking thing after another.

The British group’s co-founder, George Hinchliffe, came up with their name back in 1985 and sort of meant it as a joke. After all, the “orchestra” has just eight members (seven on tour) instead of the 60 or 70 musicians you might expect.

But the name stuck, and as the instrument caught on again over the last few years, the word became “the default term for a group of ukuleles,” Hinchliffe wrote in an email. An orchestra of ukuleles, a herd of trombones, a gaggle of kazoos — and so on. (Hinchliffe also coined the term “bonsai guitar.”)

The group sings and plays a little bit of everything: Tchaikovsky, Sinatra, Nirvana, you name it. (Seriously, check them out on YouTube). And what they’ve discovered by experimenting so much is that the ukulele serves as a “nonsense detector,” which helps weed out weak tunes that more highfalutin’ instruments can cover up. If a melody sounds good on a uke, it’s a good melody.

“The ukulele is like a pencil drawing rather than a full-color oil painting,” Hinchliffe said. “It has immediacy and liveliness and is less cumbersome than a truck full of synthesizers or a pipe organ.”

It’s also a lot easier to learn, which is why teacher Dan Pepper is bringing 16 or so of his students from Sud­low Intermediate School in Davenport to Sunday’s concert. Pepper raised $1,500 on Kickstarter to buy 30 ukes for his classes and the school’s new ukulele club. All 200 of his current sixth-grade students will learn to play by the end of the year.

The club performs at open houses around town and plans to go caroling.

“It’s sort of cool how it has taken hold with some of the kids,” he said, explaining that for beginners, the four-string ukulele has a much faster pay-off than a six-string guitar. A basic C chord requires three fingers on a guitar but just one on a uke.